Man… sorry I am joining the discussion late. I was very busy with all the raping and such. It’s unbelievable how much raping and destruction they expect from me this week. Plus, I still have the naken human pyramid to finish by the 15th. Damnit.
Anyway, are there actually any documents or photos available for review? Or are we just supposed to go off of hearsay from both sides? I mean seriously, two pages of discussion and not one person here has actually read any official document or seen any photo. It’s a bit premature to come up with any legitimate conclusion.
Do rapes happen in the military? Of course. If that was not an issue, there wouldnt be entire freaking EO regulations and programs. I think I had to sit through over a dozen anit-rape, rape prevention, and EO briefings before ever deploying to Iraq. Whenever a soldier changes units, among the briefings he receives upon arrival is rape prevention.
The Army has an institution does not condone rape.
The individuals who make up the Army are not magically immune from committing fraud, rape, murder, theft, cover ups, etc. The fact that individual human beings committ such acts has little to do with the Army itself. There are criminals in the Army. There are criminals outside the Army. When looking at crime, conspiracy and cover-ups across a broad spectrum, the only common denominator is the fact that humans are capable of committing heinous, selfish, acts.
Regardless of who you work for, how much your organization tries to prevent something, or how much you are discouraged by peers from doing something, you will still do it if that is your nature or if some combination of greed, oppurtunity or desperation causes you to do it.
Blanket statements that its all the Army’s fault, that this is somehow caused or encouraged by the military service, or similarly that the Army is somehow full of all righteous people and it weeds out the criminals… it’s all worthless hot air.
So here’s my major heartburn. The timeline. LaVena Johnson was killed in 2005. The investigation was “complete” and case closed a couple years ago. Maybe some of the Dope legal eagles can chime in here about how this would have gone down in the civilian world, but I find it hard to believe this would have been declared a suicide, and if it was that the case would have been this resistant to being re-opened. Maybe this kind of stuff happens in the civilian world as well(it almost certainly HAS happened, it’s a big place) but the civilian justice system seems much more transparent and responsive to calls for further investigation/clarification than the military system. If a civilian investigator closed a case as a suicide when these kinds of questions were still on the table, I’m thinking a competent attorney for the family, pushing to re-open the case, could get results in far less than three years.
Something just doesn’t add up. Did LaVena’s family just recently start pressing the issue? Did they go through the wrong channels? Did they sign off on all the original paperwork and have her body cremated, making follow up impossible? Three years is a long time to make no significant progress on a case. One of the stories said Johnson’s father refused to believe the Army’s line of “suicide” from the beginning, having seen her body in the funeral home and noted loose teeth and a black eye and lye burns on her genitals. So he’s been fighting this for three years, as has the local congressman and TV station, all with no results. I can’t imagine it routinely takes three years to re-open an investigation. So what can we do about it? Folks who’ve been in the military, what would you do about it if it were one of your friends/family?
Don’t confuse Private Snuffy with General Chaos. Even as an E-6 I have no input in the day-to-day workings of my unit, let alone engaging or assisting in a coverup.
That’s why we are so up in arms about this. The “Army” or whatever service you choose to name has a myriad of people within its ranks, and all but a select few with the power to make these sorts of decisions are totally oblivious to stuff like this.
The military is not the big monolith that you make it out to be. We are not Borg. Decisions are always made without my input. Therefore, I would request that those of us in a position of ignorance with regard to this incident not get tarred with that brush.
If they find out who did this, fry the bastards. It’s that simple. Just don’t fry the rest of us along with the people who actually committed the crime.
See, now I tried to be nice and get your back, but since you drooling morons with 35 max scores on the ASVAB don’t appreciate it when your betters back you up, you’re on your own.
(FTR, I scored an 93 on my ASVAB, which is why the Army, in it’s infinite wisdom, allocated my awesome cerebral talents where they belonged…in the field artillery!)
Actually, after a little rethinking, I’m going to take this back and disagree that Cartooniverse is anything like Der Trihs, let alone in the same pod.
Cartooniverse is obtuse and a little annoying, but he’s hell and gone from Trihs. He stands up for himself in the Pit, and he doesn’t back down when things get hairy, which in and of itself makes him quite a bit better than our resident flake. Also, I could be wrong, but I don’t remember him actually wishing death on anyone or going off from the perspective of some little fantasy worldview, and that combined with his fighting back puts him an order of magnitude above Trihs. I was wrong to equate the two.
Just to be clear, Cartooniverse, most of us really are in agreement that this should be re-investigated and any guilty party imprisoned if anything comes to light. What we don’t want to see are witchhunts or repeats of the Duke Lacrosse Team fuck-up. Once you realize that, we’re all going to be more or less on the same page, with regard to Ms. Johnson, anyway.
